2022/107: When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill

2022/107: When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill

I thought that the general aversion to dragons was stupid. It was just a thing that happened. There was no reason to get embarrassed about it. Still. I didn’t like looking at it. I didn’t like the attention that Beatrice had given it. It was too embarrassing. Too female. I felt ashamed in ways that I couldn’t explain. It was as though she had drawn pictures of naked breasts. Or soiled sanitary napkins. [p. 151]

When Alex (not Alexandra, thank you) is four years old, the little old lady down the road turns into a dragon. Of course Alex doesn't initially understand what's happened: dragoning is a shameful, feminine thing, no more a topic of polite conversation than menstruation. True, dragoning -- the transformation of woman into dragon -- has been happening since at least the 1890s, and it's becoming more frequent in 1950s America. (I am not sure whether it also happens elsewhere in the world: the focus of this novel is small-town America.) And then comes the Mass Dragoning of 1955, in which more than six hundred thousand American women are transformed in a single day. This imense metamorphosis is also known as the Day of Missing Mothers, though -- according to a scientist quoted later in the novel -- many of the women were not mothers, and some 'were women by choice, and by the great yearnings of their hearts, and were not labeled as such at birth, and yet are women all the same.' [p. 247].

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